Oh, there would be a backlash for it, there's no doubt. And this would be a problem if Arcee actually identified herself as a male but she doesn't.
Check definition of transgender. If she's now physically a "female" (whatever the hell it means for TFs) who's identyfiyng as a "female" then there's no talk about her being transgendered. There's no longer any mismatch between her self-identity and sex. Wait... What sex in TFs? Why it again makes no flarkin sense? Oh, wait, it's Arcee's origin. I forgot. It's like the Twilight Zone 24/7.
If Arcee identifies as female and is "biologically" female, like what you're saying, Arcee is not transgender. But the thing is that time and time again we're shown in canon that Arcee is NOT happy with what was done to them, so basically Arcee DOESN'T identify as female, and because of Barber's sloppy writing this is just swept under the rug and Arcee's referred to as female anyway even though they've explicitly been shown to hate having their gender tampered with without their consent. The whole point of our argument is that since canon has it so that Arcee was forced to be female without their consent, having Arcee come to terms with being female is basically making this a story about a male Cybertronian being given a gender reassignment surgery when they never wanted it, and just having to accept being female and identify as that even though they never wanted to be.
Again, she suffered a change that made her from genderless/male to female. That doesn't affect how she sees herself. I understand this is a complicated matter and it's one that should have been handled better but it's what we currently have and it doesn't serve any purpose to ignore it.
Transgender people are living with mismatched gender and sex before their operation for some time and then are undergoing reassignment to feel better. Not the other way around. Arcee is an equivalent of a someone who was not transgender, but then forcibly was made transgender. So, you take a human male and operate him into a female. The end result will be a mismatch of sex and gender and a transgender person. This does not apply to Arcee because after operation she identifies as a female, there's no mismatch. She's not suffering different body and different identity. About the only way you could call her transgender would be if she experienced a mismatch before Jhiaxus's experiments were performed on her. If her sex did not match her gender before anything was made to her. I do not think you are using term "transgender" correctly.
Then you are wrong, because Arcee's spotlight made it obvious that nothing was unusual or worse with her before she was operated by Jhaxus. Nothing like that had place, if Arcee's to be believed.
Okay. Thing is, though, canon pokes a gigantic hole in your idea because, as is established in Spotlight: Arcee itself, Arcee was not female before Jihaxus's meddling and never wanted to be as such. That's the whole reason why Arcee went into super homicidal revenge mode and killed everything they came across that was made by Jihaxus and eventually had the pleasure of killing him over and over again when they got a hold of him. IF this was retconned so that Arcee has been an unreliable narrator this whole time like what was mentioned before and they actually forgot that they really did want to be female before the operation, you'd have a case. But as of now, there's been no such retcon.
Again, there's not really anything in that story about how she really felt as a person before since I always interpreted her reaction due to the fact that she was basically tortured.
Also they picked the first reoccuring female character in the franchise to do it with. No negative connotations there. CNA always bugged the heck out of me. Transformers are not organic. They aren't even remotely organic. They would not have a chemical compound that in any resembles DNA as the building block of their physical form. They have bodies constructed around a energy matrix (spark) and a computer core (brain module). Well sometimes. It's not easy keeping track of all the versions of everything in the franchise.
And your private headcanon has completely no meaning to who Arcee is canonicaly. There's nothing like your idea in official material, therefore she's not transgeder. Not before the operation, and certainly not after. Canonicaly. What you are doing is grasping straws because you are unable to see and admit how bad was your idea. In canon, Furman stated that there was no gender at all before and she was not conflicted in any manner. Everything started after operation. ^This is what is, plainly, black on white, word to word, in official material. What our private headcanons and imagination are has no value to anyone but us and is hardly an argument.
I think it's inaccurate to say that Arcee self-identifies as female. I think it's more like, because the maaagic coding pretty much forces other bots to see them as different/female, they just became resigned to being seen as female. But that doesn't mean they accept it on a personal level. As we saw in the recent Combiner Hunter's comic, the idea of bots being "forced to change against their will" is still a sore point.
Bah!! I dunno about this whole origin problem. But besides that,They have handled the character in the story pretty well.She isnt a `Mary Sue`,Has flaws and her personal problems.Also she is not just there unlike most characters she manages to do alot.
Gah! The problem with being a truck driver is you're stuck in a metal box for hours with nothing but random thoughts rattling around in your head. Okay so my wife has taken up gardening and I've been trying to figure out why our squash plants aren't producing fruit. Apparently there are male & female flowers and pollen and such. Birds, bees, yadda, yadda, yadda, A human female is born with all the eggs she will ever carry, males regenerate sperm. I'm just going to throw this one over the wall like a hand grenade and see where it goes: Fembots have some sort of innate ability to pollinate hotspots This is why Caminus, which has a healthy fembot population, has many hotspots, and Cybertron, which has been at war for eons and has a limited or non-existant fembot population has resorted in artificial means to re-produce. (MTO's, cold-constructed, etc.) Eh, just an idea.
If she does not identify as female, she is not transgender. She would have to be retconned in order to be transgendered. Gender is the person on the inside, sex is the person on the outside. You are saying Arcee is a "he", was born a "he," and had an unfortunate cosmetic shift. If that is the case, then the proper pronoun for arcee is "he."
Arcee was 'born' cisgendered, but could they now be considered female-to-male transgender in a weird sort of way? Being perceived as female, but really male? Or if not transgender, is there a term for that? I dunno. What a mess.
